I totally agree with DL
Personally I thought when I played guys at the Y they underrated me because I had all my natural teeth, no tatoos, a men's haircut, and spoke English (that didn't involve a swear every third word)
nothing could have made me happier. I love it when I'm underrated.
I think white guys tend to dominate snow sports and black guys tend to dominate warm weather sports. I think it has to do with how bodies developed to deal with their environments. Then you throw various socio-economics into it and there you go.
Everyone is entitled to their opinions....non-issue.
Larry probably felt like a poor guy who loved the game and excelled in it and probably felt like he had way more in common with Magic than say a Mike Dunleavy Jr and I don't blame him for a nano-second.
I think cold/warm weather point, it may have to do more with geography. Black people tend to live more in warmer climates (Africa, Brazil, Southern USA) and white people are more in colder weather. Also, if you look at natural selection, there can be groups of people, especially isolated groups of people, who may have adapted to a specific environment that may contribute to sports. For example, people that live in high altitude like Peruvians and Nepalese have been known to have a higher lung capacity due to the adapted increase of hemogoblin allowing oxygen to be used more efficiently compared to people in regular ground. Also, aren't there places in Africa like Kenya where the kids would run for miles to go to school? You get a couple of generations of the best runners from those areas and you get few kids with a pretty high aerobic capacity. I think the area where Yao Ming came from is also known as a region with tall people.
Even bringing it back to the US, there is a theory that says African Americans are indeed more athletic due to the fact that they were basically breeded for excellence during times of slavery. Obviously, slave owners wanted only the biggest, strongest and best slaves, therefore those slaves were chosen to reproduce while the weaker ones were not. After generations of doing this, the biggest and strongest slaves remained, and they would, of course, be the ancestors of today's African Americans. I think there is definitely some credence to this theory.
Do you have any links to back up this theory? It just strikes me an urban legendish. So someone's great great grandfather was bred. So what? Look at MJ's kids...not as good.
There are tons of pro athletes whose kids went pro and sometimes you even hear about legacy families in college sports going back to grandparents, but you don't usually hear about 4th and 5th generation people going pro.
If you take a dog and breed it with a champ, but then do nothing, 5 generations later you don't have a champ.
I'm just not seeing this.
It just strikes me like....Swedes play great football because they valued strength in their society when they were Vikings and the less strong Vikings got killed and didn't pass on their genes so Northern Euros do better in baseball cause the same skills for swinging a sword transfer to a bat.
Or ancient Greeks in Sparta left weak babies exposed so the only Spartans were the strongest, so years later you see lots of successful Greeks in such and such....
I'm not so sure that breeding for doing physical labor such as cotton picking and plowing and rice farming is the same as playing the fast sport of basketball. Not to mention in sports like football, yes you have big strong black linemen, but you have big strong white linemen too, and linebackers, and fullbacks. So what's up with the white guys if they weren't bred?
I'm just saying I want the link before I go for this one.